Forward Prizes

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Kathryn Bevis shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem

Left: Kathryn Bevis, a white woman with close shaved hair. She is turned away and is looking towards the camera over her shoulder. Right: The cover of her book Flamingo

Seren poet Kathryn Bevis has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2023 for her poem ‘My Body Tells Me She’s Filling for Divorce’. The poem was originally published in our sister magazine Poetry Wales before going on to win the Second Light Poetry Competition 2022. It was also published in Kathryn’s debut pamphlet Flamingo.

This year’s Best Single Poem categories, which include both written and performed poems, were judged by Joelle Taylor, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Caroline Bird, Chris Redmond and Sue Roberts. Of the shortlists, panel chair Joelle Taylor said: ‘Between the two categories we have curated shortlists that exemplify all that is distinct, innovative, and alive in British poetry and poetic thought.’

The winners of this year’s Forward Prizes will be announced in an award ceremony later this year. The shortlists for all categories including Best Collection and Best First Collection can be viewed on the Forward Prizes website.

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Friday Poem – ‘We are coming’ by Kim Moore

Earlier this week, Kim Moore was announced the winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2022. This week’s Friday Poem is ‘We are coming’ from her wining collection All The Men I Never Married. You can hear Kim chatting in-depth about the book on the The Seren Poetry Podcast which is available now on all podcast platforms.

This cover shows a collage of a male figure made up of tiny images of nature. The figure is surrounded by butterflies which stand out against the black background. The text reads All The Men I Never Married, Kim Moore. Winner of the Forward Prize.

Pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire, All The Men I Never Married is Kim Moore’s award-winning and critically acclaimed second collection. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love. She turns the spotlight on interactions between men and women, revealing easy misogyny, everyday sexism and uncomfortable truths about the challenges women face on a daily basis.

We are coming under cover of darkness, with our strawberry marks, our familiars, our third nipples, our ill-mannered bodies, our childhoods spent hobbled like horses where we were told to keep our legs closed, where we sat in the light of a window and posed and waited for the makers of the world to tell us again how a woman is made. We are arriving from the narrow places, from the spaces we were given, with our curses and our spells and our solitude, with our potions we swallow to shrink us small as insects or stretch us into giants, for yes, there are giants amongst us, we must warn you. There will be riots, we’re carrying all that we know about silence as we return from the forests and towers, unmaking ourselves, stepping from the pages of books, from the eye of the camera, from the cages we built for each other, the frames of paintings, from every place we were lost and afraid in. We stand at the base of our own spines and watch tree turn to bone and climb each vertebra to crawl back into our minds, we’ve been out of our minds all this time, our bodies saying no, we were not born for this, dragging the snare and the wire behind us.

The Seren Poetry Podcast is a new series of in-depth interviews with Seren poets. Listen to our in-depth interview with Kim about All The Men I Never Married in episode 9 which is available now.

Simply search ‘The Seren Poetry Podcast’ in your favourite podcast app and follow or subscribe to have all future editions delivered straight to your podcast feed. Available on all platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts. Don’t forget to leave us a review if you like what you hear.

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website for £9.99

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Friday Poem – ‘43. When I open my ribs’ by Kim Moore

To celebrate her collection All The Men I Never Married being shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, this week’s Friday Poem is ‘43. When I open my ribs’ by Kim Moore.

This cover shows a collage image of the figure of a man made up of tiny pictures of nature. He is against a black background surrounded by butterflies. The text reads: All The Men I Never Married Kim Moore

Kim Moore’s eagerly awaited second collection All The Men I Never Married is pointedly feminist, challenging and keenly aware of the contradictions and complexities of desire. The 48 numbered poems take us through a gallery of exes and significant others where we encounter rage, pain, guilt, and love.

“All the Men I Never Married is a work of immense focus, intelligence and integrity.” – The Yorkshire Times

43. When I open my ribs a dragon flies out and when I open my mouth a sheep trots out and when I open my eyes silverfish crawl out and make for a place that’s not mine. When I open my fists two skylarks soar out and when I open my legs a horse gallops out and when I open my heart a wolf slips out and watches from beneath the trees. When I open my arms a hare jumps out and when I show you my wrists a shadow cries out and when I fall to my knees a tiger stalks out and will not answer to me. Now that the beasts that lived in my chest have turned tail and fled, now that I’m open and the sky has come in and left me with nothing but space, now that I’m ready to lie like a cross and wait for the ghost of him to float clear away, will my wild things come back, will the horse of my legs and the dragon of my ribs, and the gentle sheep which lived in my throat and the silverfish of my eyes and the skylarks of my hands and the wolf of my heart, will they all come back and live here again, now that he’s left, now I’ve said the word whisper it rape, now I’ve said the word whisper it shame, will my true ones, my wild, my truth, will my wild come back to me again?

All The Men I Never Married is available on the Seren website: £9.99

Create your free Seren account and enjoy 20% off every book you buy direct from us.

Catch Kim at the Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival on the 30th July! She’ll be taking part in a session on Poetry & Empowerment and discussing The Result is What You See Today, an anthology about running which she co-edited with Paul Deaton and Ben Wilkinson. See the full programme and buy tickets at cardiffpoetryfestival.com. All our in person events are also being streamed online.

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Friday Poem – ‘Cell’ by Deryn Rees-Jones

This week’s Friday Poem is ‘Cell’ by Deryn Rees-Jones which appears in her collection Erato.

It was announced yesterday that Deryn’s poem ‘Firebird’, also from Erato, is amongst those highly commended by the Judges in the Forward Prizes for Poetry. Other highly commended poets include Carol Ann Duffy, Inua Ellams, Hugo Williams, Ann Wroe and Morgan Parker.

Named after the Greek muse of lyric poetry, Erato combines documentary-style prose narratives with the passionate lyric poetry for which Rees-Jones is renowned. Here, however, as she experiments with form, particularly the sonnet, Rees-Jones asks questions about the value of the poet and poetry itself. What is the difference, she asks in one poem, between a sigh and a song? Erato’s themes are manifold but particularly focus on personal loss, desire and recovery, in the context of a world in which wars and displacement of people has become a terrifying norm.

 

Erato is is available on the Seren website: £9.99

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